Community Tech/Page Curation and New Pages Feed improvements
This page documents a project currently under development by the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team.
We invite you to join the discussion on the talk page.
Contents
Background[edit]
This project was proposed in the Community Wishlist 2019 and was voted #1 with 157 votes. Community Tech team has committed to addressing as many of the project goals as possible.
In 2018, the Community Tech and Growth teams worked on a project aimed at general improvement of the AfC process. For more information, see the project page and background research for the project.
Problem statement[edit]
The wishlist proposal presents a broad goal of improving the New Page Review process and enlists key phabricator tickets that are important for the project. These tickets were prioritized and deemed important by the NPP community. These are listed below (in no special order).
| Task title | Phabricator link | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Redirects with RfD tags should still display in the New Pages Feed as 'Nominated for deletion' | task T157046 |  Done
|
| 'Potential Issues' flagged in Page Curation Toolbar Page Info flyout | task T207847 | Done
|
| Allow filtering by no citations in page curation | task T169120 | Done
|
| Send Message to creator without needing to 'unreview'/'re-review' the article | task T207442 | Done
|
| Page curation adds text to first deletion discussion page if it already exists | task T169441 | In development |
| Implement addition of un-redirected pages to Special:NewPages and Special:NewPagesFeed | task T92621 | |
| Redirects converted into articles should appear in the New Pages Feed indexed by the date of creation and creator of the article, not of the redirect | task T157048 | In development |
| Adding a "Potential COI" alert to the feed | task T207757 | |
| Add "previously deleted" as a possible issue (flagged in red) in the New Pages Feed/Page Curation Tool | task T189929 | Done
|
| Allow filtering by date range in Special:NewPagesFeed | task T167475 | In development |
| Special:NewPageFeed - add option to filter by pageviews | task T207238 | Alternative proposed |
| Keyword Search for New Pages Feed | task T207761 | |
| Enable page curation tools to be loaded on any page (optionally) | task T207485 | In development |
| Reviewer Notes system in Page Curation Tools: system for reviewers to flag talk page comments on new pages to other reviewers | task T207452 | Done
|
| Tagging Feedback in Page Curation Tools should also be sent to talk page | task T207443 | In development |
| Page Curation Tools to add userspace CSD Log/PROD Log functionality | task T207237 | |
| Dragable Corners on Page Curation toolbar windows (for resizing) | task T207439 | Done
|
| Page Curation toolbar: do not mark pages as 'reviewed' when adding CSD and PROD tags | task T208685 | Done
|
| Make PageTriage wiki agnostic | task T50552 | Rejected |
Status updates[edit]
August 20, 2019[edit]
It’s been a few months, and we’re excited to post some updates. We’ve been continuously working on Page Curation & New Pages Feed improvements, and the team has made solid progress. With that in mind, we’ll share some recent news — both highlights and challenges — at this stage in the process. We look forward to your feedback on the Talk page. Thank you!
Work We’ve Completed So Far[edit]
We’ve been updating the project page table with the requests marked as “Done.” Before this update, we had 5 requests completed (T189929, T169120, T207439, T208685, and T157046). We now have a few more completed items:
- T207847: 'Potential Issues' from ORES should be flagged in Page Curation Toolbar Page Info flyout: You can now see the potential issues added by the Growth team (“Spam,” “Vandalism,” and “Attack”) flagged in the Page Curation toolbar. Also, the logic used to pull ORES data for the feed is the same logic used in the toolbar flyout. For this reason, the labels should have the same behavior as those displayed in Special:NewPagesFeed.
- T227218: Surface copyvio as possible issue in Page Curation toolbar "Page info" flyout: This work is complementary to T207847. With these changes, “Copyvio" was included included in the list of "Possible issues" in the Page Curation toolbar.
- T207442: Send Message to creator without needing to 'unreview'/'re-review' the article: The development work is complete, and the template (Sentnote-NPF) has now been updated by the community (and thanks for that!). With this work, we have decoupled two sections that were previously tied together: a) “mark as reviewed,” b) send a message to the creator process.
- T229779: Toolbar: Don't show "Add a message for the creator" without a textbox: This work is now on production. With this change, the “Add a message to the creator” is only shown when a textbox is provided for the message.
- T207452: Flag talk page feedback in toolbar: The development work is complete, and it will be released to production after Wikimania. Once it’s live, you’ll see talk page feedback flagged (and linked) within the info flyout. In addition, you’ll see a notification regarding the number of new Talk page messages within the toolbar itself (thanks to the great suggestion from Barkeep49).
Work That is Almost Complete[edit]
- T207443: Feedback for creator should also be posted to article talk page: The development work is complete, and the changes will be released to production soon. Once these changes are live, reviewers will able to post messages to the article Talk page in a new section.
- T207485: Enable page curation tools to be loaded on any page (optionally): This work is in advanced stages of development. We’re reviewing the code. When it’s complete, reviewers will be able to access the “Add article to NewPagesFeed link” in the Tools menu. When they click on the link, the article will be added to the PageTriage feed and the Curation Toolbar will become visible.
Work that Presents Challenges[edit]
- T50552: Make PageTriage wiki agnostic: We’ve discussed this request, and we unanimously feel that it’s beyond our scope. Here’s why (according to analysis from the engineering team): PageTriage, while a useful extension, is written in a way that’s completely based on English Wikipedia processes. In order to convert the extension to work on other wikis, the extension would need to be adjusted — not only for other processes, but also to have a configurable process definition that each wiki could define for itself, based on each community’s needs. Consequently, this request would require a slew of analyses and decisions, such as: what it means to tag an article for deletion (e.g. what pages messages goes to, what templates are used, if there are follow-ups the system should be aware of, etc), the way we tag articles, which articles show up in the queue, and more. Moreover, we couldn’t easily trim down the scope by disabling some features. The internal workings of the extension are deeply intertwined with English Wikipedia. We would still need to do a significant amount of development work to ensure that the behavior remained stable and useful to other wikis. For these reasons, this request is unfortunately too big, so we cannot take it.
- T207238: Special:NewPageFeed - add option to filter by pageviews and the associated spike: T225169: [4 hours] Investigate whether it's efficient to order by tag value (DBA input requested): This work presents significant challenges, but there may be an alternative solution.
- First, the challenges (according to analysis from the engineering team): In order to filter/sort by inputted numbers, the numbers must be stored in the database in a specific manner. This first step alone would take several weeks, if not months, according to the estimates provided by Wikimedia database experts. Then, we would need to populate the sortable cells with pageview data, which comes from an external service. To do this, we would need to create a process that pulls the data from the external service and stores it in MediaWiki’s PageTriage table. Then, we would do this work repeatedly, so that the numbers would remain up-to-date, over the entire PageTriage database (which consists of tens of thousands of rows, if not more). This process is both uncommon (in MediaWiki servers) and complex; we would need to define this process and identify the correct way to implement it, in collaboration with Operations and Database experts. In total, we do not find the request, in its current form, within our scope. For more details on the technical analysis and discussion with the database administrators, you can check out the associated investigation ticket.
- Second, the alternative solution (as described in the T225169 investigation): We could display the number of pageviews in the article record, without allowing for sorting or filtering. Would this be a satisfactory alternative to the community? And, if so, how would you like the number of pageviews displayed (e.g. average per day, median per day, total views in the last 30 days, etc)? Note that the results displayed will be from 24 hours earlier than the display time, and we’ll want to query from a maximum of 30 days ago (for the sake of general efficiency and manageability of this feature). We do not yet know if we can do this work — but, if we could, would it be worth our time and effort, in your opinion?
Requesting Feedback[edit]
We want to know your thoughts. Please let us know your thoughts on the Talk page. Thank you!
April 30, 2019[edit]
The Community Tech team has kicked off development work on this project. You may follow progress on the project tickets by looking at the phabricator board. I will also be updating the ticket status in the table above as things progress.
5 February, 2019[edit]
This project is in its early stages of research to investigate project goals, dependencies and potential roadblocks. Your feedback is welcome on the talk page.
12 March, 2019[edit]
We are beginning to assess technical feasibility of tickets prioritised in the wishlist proposal. The technical work on this project is slated to start in late April/early May.
